Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

Archive

Volume 5 Number 3, December 2004

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Dames, Nicholas.  Amnesiac Selves: Nostalgia, Forgetting and British Fiction, 1810-1870.   Oxford: Oxford U. P., 2001.  298 pages.  ISBN 0-19-514357-4.   $58.00 (hardback), $24.95 (paperback).

Reviewed by

Roger Dawkins

University of New South Wales

            In Amnesiac Selves: Nostalgia, Forgetting and British Fiction, 1810-1870, Nicholas Dames achieves the aim he sets himself in his introduction: to study the effects of a noticeable lack of “explicit remembrance” in a range of Victorian novels (3).  Amnesiac Selves is a fascinating and lucidly written study that explores the social novels of Jane Austen, the progress novels of Charlotte Brönte, the fictional autobiographies of William Makepeace Thackeray and Charles Dickens, the sensation novels of Wilkie Collins and the historical novels of George Eliot.  Dames claims that the Victorian novel is preoccupied with eliminating aspects of memory and only remembering what is useful for the forward movement of its narrative.  In his study Dames argues that, at the time of its construction, the Victorian novel developed this preoccupation into a stylistic technique in tandem with the dominant trends of psychological theory.  For instance, Amnesiac Selves defines the elision of memory as a certain kind of nostalgia, one that enacts a specific form of forgetting identified with the “pathological forgetting” known as amnesia (7).  Important in lending this argument weight is Dames’—albeit brief—mention of the difference between the kind of remembrance typical of the Victorian novel on the one hand, and the twentieth-century novels of Marcel Proust and James Joyce on the other.  Finally Dames states that, at the level of the novel’s descriptive syntax and narrative, the significance of amnesia impacts on the subjective act of interpretation and results in the constitution of the reader as a “nostalgic subject” (19). 

            Consider a few examples from Amnesiac Selves, the first of which is Dames’ analysis of amnesia in Austen’s novels.  He writes that Austen’s novels work to “eliminate,” “dilute” and “erase” memory (23).  According to Dames, a cancellation of the past is a narrative process rooted in Austen’s reversal of the clinical notion of nostalgia that gained momentum through a “flurry of nosologies published in the 1760s” (32).  The clinical profile defined nostalgia along the lines of what is known today as homesickness.  The mind of the homesick individual is resistant to adaptation—in other words, the homesick individual is unhappy when confronted with new stimulations that disrupt the cosiness of their past familiarities.  Austen reverses this notion by sealing off the past.  Importantly also, she does not describe her characters as weighed down by the past.  Instead, she describes memory as a source of great pleasure.  In sum, memory as productive of trauma is substituted for memory as a “poignant but harmless dip into reminiscence” (36).

            Various narrative techniques underscore the function of nostalgic remembrance in Austen’s novels.  In Pride and Prejudice Dames notes how characters are depicted as disconnected from their past, “Darcy’s life-review considers his past as passed” (my emphasis 37), and so the past is presented as “ended,” “disconnected” and “periodized” (39).  To a similar effect, Dames writes that Austen often “shapes the past through a series of stereotypical terms,” thus generalizing the past and preventing the past functioning with any degree of specificity in the present (39).  Furthermore, memories are sometimes communalized: made the common property of the characters (41); and decontextualized: no longer tied to a particular place or time but are mobile (65).  Also, they are sometimes deidealized when the content of a recollection does not impact on a character’s life in any significant way—indeed, the past is so “deidealized and judged that the effort to remember it […] comes to seem like a wasted effort” (69). 

For Dames, each of these techniques emphasizes the forward movement of the narrative.  When the past is sealed up, it does not impact on the present but exists only to “provide a series of educative examples for the future” (52).  The result: the past is managed and, according to Dames, this lends a creative freedom to a character’s psychological development.  As an example Dames refers us to Mansfield Park and Fanny Price’s “empty memories” that protect her from homesickness for Pourtsmouth:

Fanny does not go home, because that home has disappeared.  What she does […] is to reconstitute “home” as Mansfield, and to feel herself free to long for a home of her own choosing—a home, we might even say, of her own nostalgic invention. (64)

Yet the reader can’t help problematizing aspects of Dames’ thesis.  For instance, how exactly can the regulation of the past from the fixed perspective of a character’s present eventually engender more than a repetition of sameness in the narrative’s progression?  Similarly, how can the past’s function as educative exemplar for the future lead to any sense of narratological newness?  In this case the content of the past, its forms, surely inspire nothing more than conformities in the future.[i]  Dames doesn’t dip into these problems—instead, Amnesiac Selves simply claims narrative newness and creativity as the outcome of amnesia.

Consider also Dames’ analysis of nostalgia in Brönte’s novels.  Dames argues that Brönte’s fiction parallels mid-Victorian phrenological theory and places its narrative emphasis on surface structures of visibility, rather than depth structures of memory (78).  For example, in the same way that a phrenologist draws her conclusions based on her perceptions of a subject’s skull (not her investigations into memory), Dames writes that in Vilette Brönte’s characters prioritize sight in their interactions with other characters (82).  “The result” according to Dames, is a “notably laconic, harsh and blunt texture to her moments of dialogue, for the modes of excavation (insinuation, probing, innuendo) are supplanted by modes of confrontation.  The field of personal encounters becomes a clash of mutually visible bodies” (83).  Alongside the bluntness of Brönte’s dialogue, Dames notes another way phrenology impacted on the Victorian novel.  Objects in the narrative (characters, a character’s physical features, even milieus) are sometimes divorced from their role in a temporal chain of cause and effect relations (100).  Dames calls this descriptive effect, notable at the level of Brönte’s plots and the syntax of her descriptive moments, parataxis (100).

            According to Dames’ interpretation, a narrative driven by phrenological technique means that character and plot do not linger on remembrance.  And, Dames argues that this makes Brönte’s fiction forward looking and dynamic.  It is, he says, “An entity that performs tasks […] makes plans, and advances into the future,” an entity that replaces “derivation” with “predication” (87).

            The effect of the coupling of phrenology and fiction described by Dames is intriguing.  Ideally, each narrative technique noted above enables the consideration of an object separately from a determining context/chain of causal relations—in short, each technique ideally enables the consideration of an object in-itself.  Underlying Dames’ reading of Brönte, then, is a broad concept of decontextualization.  Yet at the end of the day, the nuts and bolts of Dames thesis do not allow for this to occur.  Dames really only describes a limited degree of decontextualization in Brönte’s narratives: objects are interpreted distinctly from the confines of narrative memory, but in another sense Brönte’s phrenological descriptions no sooner get rid of narrative memory than replace it with another kind of memory.  Although a character may not interact by probing memory—instead privileging a phrenological reading of another’s features—the process of undergoing such a reading nevertheless relies on another kind of memory: a memory of precedents and classificatory schemes according to which another’s features are taxonomized.  The inevitable end result is the reduction of the aforementioned idealistic potential of interaction.  This is an interpretative dilemma that Dames doesn’t go far enough to avoid. 

            Consider one final example of Dames argument about nostalgia: his discussion of the autobiographical fiction of Dickens and Thackeray.  Here Dames writes that memory functions simply as the symbol of a larger narrative motif (127).  Memory is not concerned with fleeting moments of the past, but is the product of a “cleansed, organized mind” free of “uncategorizable detail” (128).  Again, this is a kind of narrative amnesia, but Dames identifies this specific branch of selective memory with the nineteenth century’s “most prevalent theory for memory and the psychic construction of identity: association psychology” (127). 

What is the relation between association psychology and literature?  Amnesiac Selves tells us that association psychology conceives the mind as “structured by innumerable learned or acquired associations between sensations and ideas, or between ideas themselves” (129). Sensations are sorted and categorized according to two laws of mental connection: the Law of Contiguity and the Law of Similarity (131).  Consequently, associationism is a psychological theory that conceives of the mind as an economical entity.  For Dames, translating the principles of associationism to literature in Victorian England licensed a narrative “incapable of fortuitous, contextless retrospects” that instead recalls only “a set of rigorously selected, symbolically or narratively relevant details” (129).  In these kinds of fictions a character has a selective memory of the past; a selective memory, moreover, that necessarily depends on their realization that the past is resolutely over (132). 

Amnesiac Selves holds that the influence of association psychology is evident in fictional reminiscences that bridge and reduce the “gaps” in a character’s life.  For example, in Dickens’ David Copperfield, David’s reminiscences neatly summarize and condense the various “strands” of his relation to Dora (142).  This is achieved by reminiscences that reduce the facts of David’s memory to a “breezy summary” and focus only on events that will “recur in a more serious form” (141).  Thackeray’s Henry Esmond is another example in which memory is condensed to the same effect, but in a slightly different way.  Here, the use of a third person pronoun is evidence of Edmond’s stabilization of memory (159).  The past is so hermetically sealed and structured that Esmond watches his memories from outside himself.[ii]

            In aligning associationism and Victorian literature, however, the reader can’t help but notice that Dames’ argument is a bit prickly at times.  The specific kind of nostalgia he is identifying in the autobiographical novel is a selective, economical and organized kind of reminiscence.  In this respect Dames makes the important point that associationism and the autobiographical novel hinge on the principle of “integrity”—in other words, “What is remembered, so the associationist claim runs, is remembered only insofar as it confirms this monad that I call my self” (137).  On this point there is a dilemma underlying Dames’ thesis.  If the mind functions to edit and categorize recollections according to a character’s transcendent sense of self (I), then isn’t there a sense in which Dames’ idea of the dynamic creativity enabled by nostalgia cannot come into fruition?  On one level, the influence of associationism and the organized categorization of the past does suggest a way the past can be left behind; but on another level, how can the forward movement enabled truly be a dynamic and creative progression when it is fuelled, at its essence, by a character’s continued re-affirmation of their (transcendent) identity (I)?

            There is another issue that could have benefited from some more through explanation.  Dames’ study seems to have at its foundation two principles.  The first holds that the function of memory described as amnesia in the Victorian novel is antithetical to the function of memory in the modern novel.  The second holds that amnesia nevertheless played an important role in the development of the modern novel (124).  Granted, a thorough explanation of these two principles would blow-out the length of Amnesiac Selves considerably, but perhaps Dames could have reached a better compromise in the time dedicated to them.  As a result there is an unfortunate ambiguity surrounding some of the key peripheral ideas of Amnesiac Selves: Dames presupposes the reader’s understanding of 1) modern philosophical concepts—such as Bergson’s pure past and Freud’s trauma, and 2) the modern literature of Joyce and Proust.[iii] Since the relationship between Victorian and modern concepts of time is so important, Amnesiac Selves would have benefited from an early chapter dedicated more thoroughly to Dames’ position on these ideas, for this would serve as a useful point of comparison for his overall thesis on amnesia. 

            Having established the importance of nostalgic forgetting as a narrative device in a range of Victorian novels, Dames’ final point is aimed at the contemporary reader of these fictions.  In a significant move, Dames argues that each of the narrative techniques described (for example: parataxis, the life-review summary, the use of third person pronouns) are not just relevant to the Victorian novel and are not only reflective of the nature of the characters’ mode of interaction.  For Dames, these techniques shape the form of the novel itself, in turn working to simultaneously constitute the interpretative subject as a nostalgic reader.  This is a semiotic argument stating that the reader’s interpretation of the written words on the page, the signs of the Victorian novel, is a pleasurable act of forgetting that always has them returning for more.[iv]

            The thesis Dames puts forward in Amnesiac Selves about the novelistic practice of sealing off the past in the Victorian novel is thought provoking.  This is especially the case today due to the popularity of Bergsonian inspired analyses of pure time in texts like literature and cinema.  Dames’ study is lucidly written and argued.  He uses a range of examples that lend a helpful clarity to his points.  As I mentioned above, however, there are times when Amnesiac Selves could have benefited from some further conceptual development.  Establishing certain peripheral ideas more decisively (such as the tension inherent to the balance Dames sets up between creativity and repetition, and the difference between Victorian and modern concepts of time) would have allowed for a more consolidated argument.